Online Marketing

Category Archives:Online Marketing

Social Media is no doubt here to stay, we’ve seen this grow and be a key part of a developing business of the last few years, how they engage and reach out to their customer base, so here our the key trends for another successful year of social media marketing for your business.

Engagement is should be top of your list

Facebook often updates its algorithm and for us the key one was made in early 2018 when they announced a focus on meaningful interactions. So what does this mean? well their algorithm started favouring content that sparks a genuine conversation, which should inspire your business page owners to really try and create more engaging content. So as this organic reach becomes far more harder, the only way for a business to reach out to new and existing customer is to ensure that their content is interesting, appealing and engaging so its time for 2019 to really think of what your business strategy for every channel to continue reaching your followers where ever they may be.

Influencer marketing and the rise of micro-influencers

You will no doubt have heard all about influencer marketing and how big brands are using trend setters as part of their marketing mix and indeed for influencers the benefit is being able to reach a dedicated audience and they can make considerable sums through things like paid sponsorships and the like. For a growing business the big influencers are becoming more expensive so this is where the micro-influencers come into play, maybe its a instagrammer with a massive reach in the Devon restaurant trade or a school mum, both of these nano-influencers could work for your business if you have a restaurant in Torbay or a book shop for example. The key part is that you don’t require a big budget to work with them but you may need to spend more time on the research to find the perfect one.

The use of social media for selling

The use of social media is moving from awareness and engagement and moving towards consideration and sales enablement in your business sales funnel: does your business have a plan for this?

Artificial Intelligence and customer service

The use of automated bots and automated messaging have already shown up in many businesses customer service and indeed if you have a GMail account this is already reading your emails and suggesting suitable replies. There can be no doubt that social media has made it easier for customers to reach a business and this in turn leads to customer expectations about a far better response time from the business concerned. It is our prediction that in 2019 this will bring an ever increasing adoption of artificial intelligence as part of social customer service and it’s time for business to give it a try.

Stories, stories, stories

The use of stories has grown massively in 2018 since Snapchat first rolled them out, they have been adopted by competitors social networks and are emerging now as a key element of customer engagement simply as they’re seen be far more genuine, in short stories are short user-generated photo and video collections that disappear after 24 hours.

The end of fake followers

It used to be that a business could overnight have 10,000 followers, they bought these for a fee and for any social media concerned about its reputation this had to stop as they all want a social network where people (and brands) can grow their community through genuine interest and engagement, not fake followers. This significant change started rolling out mid 2018 and we predict that 2019 will prove that the number of followers will not be as relevant anymore comparing to the actual influence and engagement that you’re having within your community.

So in summary your business should not be chasing an increase in followers on any social network if you’re not already engaging with your existing ones. A smart business in 2019 will spend more time on growing their community organically increasing engagement with interesting and relevant content.

We would be delighted to listen to your business goals and help you realise them, please get in touch today on 01392 241653 or contact us through our website here, we’d be delighted to have a no obligation chat to see if we can help your business grow.

We love working with ambitious businesses and as such over a year ago we started a business networking group in Totnes with the aim of doing just that. We chose Totnes as we feel the town is a hub for creative business people who are ambitious and want to achieve, so G12 was born. G12 Business Networking in Totnes is aiming to be the best business network you can attend, it doesn’t matter if you’re a startup, sole trader, entrepreneur or a member of a larger team, you’ll love the relaxed, informal environment.

In 2018 your business needs a digital marketing strategy and this needs to constantly evolve if you hope to stay ahead of your competition, we have a wealth of experience in managing this and developing new strategies for customers as their businesses evolve . As alot of it involves staying on top of current marketing trends and keeping your website and social media profiles properly updated their are also some key issues to be aware of, so here are a few things that you can do that will help your business work better online.

Consistent tone of voice across all social channels

A customer should be able to recognize your business through the look of the business and how you ‘speak’ online, if you want one of the best examples ‘Just Do It’ is one of the simplest, most recognisable slogans of all time – a line Nike has used for the past 15 years – what is your business tone?

Multiple Devices are here to stay

Now more than ever your strategy needs to focus away from only how your business features on a computer screen, to how it features on mobiles, tablets. So your digital marketing strategy should cater to that with ads scaled to fit mobile devices and webpages that can be viewed easily on any device. Mobile ads should even take priority over television and radio ads, especially if you’re targeting a younger demographic.

Time to automate your Content Marketing

There area a multitude of tools that marketers can use to publish content across multiple social media platforms and these tools have evolved to allow you to create and publish content automatically with the push of a button. Social media is even more important than ever in 2018, and the ability to quickly post content to a wider audience will help you stay ahead of your competition.

Please ensure that you share useful content

As important as it is to come up with your own content, you shouldn’t hesitate to share other people’s content if you find it useful and interesting. This is a great way to share links back to your own content and reach a wider audience, especially if you stick to content that is relevant to your own company. You should read out post Social Media and the rule of Two Thirds for more helpful advice on getting this right.

These are just a few things that you can do to stay on top of digital marketing trends during the coming year. As simple as they may seem, they won’t help you if you don’t put in the proper effort. Always work to keep your website and social media profiles updated, and pay close attention to your competition. Digital marketing changes quickly, and you want to make sure you aren’t left behind.

More than ever in 2018 developing a digital strategy for your business shouldn’t be just an afterthought – the businesses that succeed will be the ones that make it integral to their business growth from the start. Now the sales bit, if you need help in creating your digital strategy for your business then please call us on 01392 241653 or contact us through the website here for a no obligation conversation.

Here at Gleave Media we are honoured to have been named as one of the three best marketing agencies in Exeter.

Three Best Rated is a business recommendation website. It selects what it considers to be the three best businesses within a business category, like marketing agencies, for a given city. They select businesses based on several criteria such as reviews, pricing, value, trust, general excellence and more are independent of the businesses themselves, consequently making this a really valuable award. Their employees check out businesses they are considering listing for their website, at no stage did they contact us so we had no idea of their due diligence on our business. They only informed us afterwards when they selected Gleave Media Ltd as one of their three best.

Three Best Rated® is an American business based in Austin Texas and was created with a simple goal to find you the top 3 local businesses, professionals, restaurants and health care providers in any city. They check business’s reviews, reputation, history, complaints, ratings, satisfaction, nearness, trust, cost, general excellence using a 50-Point Inspection.

So I like to give a big thank you for selecting Gleave Media, we’re honoured to have been chosen and would also like to congratulate the other two Exeter Marketing Agencies who were also selected as well.

It should go without saying that its no good having a great product or website if people cant find it, almost pointless in fact.

We’ve written previously about the importance of a Google local listing and it is vital that this is optimised so that your business can be found by local customers. Local information is becoming increasingly important in search engine results pages and Google continues to to show and place importance on mapped and local results wherever possible.

So how does your business fix this?

First of all if you haven’t already then you need to claim and verify your Google local business listing, ensuring it has the correct details, name, address and opening times are key.

Then optimise content, keywords and contact details, all useful information for anybody searching, you also need to make sure your contact details across the web are universally consistent.

Finally the ‘icing’ on top is by collecting reviews, and yes this is difficult, you’ll ask far more customers than will give you reviews but do you ask?

Just for the record you can read our Google reviews here and our facebook reviews here both actively collected and always asked for….

Getting your business listing correctly on all search engines shouldn’t be an afterthought – the businesses that succeed will be the ones that make it integral to their strategy from the start. If you need help in ensuring your business is listed correctly then please call us on 01392 241653 or contact us through the website here for a no obligation conversation.

A well planned customer relationship management or CRM system can be a great differentiator for your growing business. If you have the ability early on to capture important information about the type of customers you have, their buying habits and interests and the ability to analyze and synthesize this information to your benefit, you have the ability to not only maintain powerful, long-lasting customer relationships, you also have the ability to grow your business exponentially through referrals and repeat business.

According to a study published in Forbes magazine, a fully implemented CRM in a business such as yours has the potential to grow sales by 29%. The CRM can be a powerful tool to help you reach the pinnacle success in the type of business you are engaged. One of the ways your CRM provides a tremendous value to you, particularly as you start out, is through crowdsourcing your customers for feedback on your business processes. Soliciting customer feedback and participation in evaluating how you do business allows you to improve your business and strengthen their loyalty and commitment to the products and services you offer.

The Importance of Crowdsourced Process Improvements

Your CRM is a hub for managing customer information and interaction. If you think beyond a myopic use of the CRM as a data gathering tool and broaden its reach to include email, social media and other forms of dialogue and communication, you have in hand a powerful tool for developing a better customer profile and managing expectations. Information that is gathered through the CRM is captured in real time and represents a way to capture instant feedback relative to the way you do business and how your employees meet and manage the needs of your vital asset.

Crowdsourcing involves the inclusion of all aspects of your business and the sales cycles, from customer service representatives to management to the sales team to the very customers themselves. Feedback elicited from the feedback can be fed to the different functions within your business to better understand:

What went right with the sale/transaction?

What areas of improvement are present?

Is this customer more likely or less likely to continue a business relationship with us?

Harnessing the power of the CRM to engage the customer is an important way to derive tremendous value from your system, we help many businesses do just that. For a no obligation conversation then please call us on 01392 241653 or contact us through the website here.

If your business does not have a digital strategy then how do you know where you’re heading and what you’re trying to achieve?

In this post we identify 5 problems that in our experience will effect the operation of your business if you do not have a clear Digital Plan.

Your business has no focus

We find that businesses with a digital plan do not also have a set of business goals for what they want to achieve in terms of customer development or business growth and if you do not have these business have goals you likely do not have enough resources to reach the goals and you then do not evaluate whether you’re achieving those goals.

Do you really know your customers at all?

There can be no doubt that digital is one of the most measurable marketing tools ever. However alot of the common statistical programs in use today will only tell you volume, not demographics and touchpoints – so how do you identify areas you can improve unless you know them?

Your business is not integrated

We often find if a business does have some kind of digital activity this is not focused on the business its run by ‘John who knows facebook’ at the same time as being a salesperson or the managers PA as she has a few spare hours a week. This should be integrated with your business so everyone buys into the digital plan and can play their part in identifying opportunities for the business to grow online.

You are loosing out to competitors who do have a clear digital plan

Pretty much every business we work with has some form of statistical monitoring of enquiry traffic and even just traffic – Facebook insights??. Unfortunately for alot of business this is as far as they go, they do not review and then act on the results of that review so they can decide where to implement the key aspects of the business marketing like email marketing and social media marketing.

Your marketing is not cost effective

Digital in 2016 has to be one of the most cost effective ways for any business to reach its target market, the only issue the growing business we work with come across is the lack of specific specialist digital skills which make it difficult for the business to respond effectively and this is where we come in as your outsourced digital partner.

So there you have it, five clear issued that will be effecting your business if you do not have a clear Digital Plan – if you are one of those businesses why not get in touch now, through the website here OR call us on 01392 241653 for a no obligation chat…

Managing your Trip Advisor profile and keeping it current can be an extremely important benefit to your business, especially for those in the travel industry and the many travel-related businesses like restaurants, shopping centers, tourist attractions, and real estate agents. But keeping information on your profile up-to-date isn’t enough – you need to be actively involved with reviewing feedback and responding to it, and even trying your best to win TripAdvisor stars and awards to whatever extent this is possible.

Here are some of the reasons that TripAdvisor can have such a big impact on your business.

Reliable resource

TripAdvisor has become one of the best online sources of travel information, and its directory of hotels flights and everything associated with vacationing expands every day. It is one of the first places people go to give their opinions of hotels and all the businesses associated with traveling. This being the case, it should also be the first place you go as a business owner to see what customers are saying about your services or products.

Marketing benefits

TripAdvisor has become a very powerful marketing tool which can have a profound influence on visitor traffic and the behavioral habits of travelers themselves. Very often travelers who take the time to review a travel-related business on TripAdvisor provide very detailed descriptions of the experience, including accommodations, amenities, services, and other highlights.

This amounts to free advertising for your business, assuming that the review is a good one. If a review of your business is less than desirable, it should be an alert to you that some aspect of your business needs attention, whether it’s customer service or something else. It’s no coincidence that a recent survey found more than 90% of all travelers preferred to book accommodations for hotels when photos and detailed descriptions were available to provide desired information.

In short, many of the people you are targeting for your travel-related business make use of TripAdvisor in one way or another – and this means you should be using it to your advantage.

If you would like a non obligation chat with the team at GleaveMedia to understand more about managing your Trip Advisor profiles better then please call us on 01392 241653 or get in touch through the website here.

The latest Facebook news feed updates have found a new way for all users to view the posts from friends they actually want to hear from and read pages they actually want to see by creating a more personalized news feed.

From facebooks’ own internal research it shows that each time an average Facebook member logs on there are 1,500 brand new updates, photos and videos waiting for them that have appeared since their last visit and if you have a large number of friends this can increase to over 10,000. So now Facebook has combined these features and put them all into one place and by choosing to ‘See First,’ any user will be able to create a brand new feed in a matter of minutes, and guarantee that they will never miss an important update, this Facebook video explains more about it…

These updates will allow any user control over what they want to see, which has to be beneficial surely?

Your business could well be sitting on a goldmine of data that you didn’t even know you had and if you took a look further and could well find some amazing nuggets ready to be discovered, such as;

Existing clients you can sell other products and services to.

Old clients, can they be resold to?

Prospects – people you’ve met who you haven’t followed up with.

All these and more will be sitting in some kind of database, so how do you find value in your own data? you just need to find it.

So how do you find it? well start at the beginning although you now may use a CRM system, how did you collate data originally, maybe it was a crd index file or even an old show box for all those cards you collected at networking meeting – either way go back relook and find them. It is never to late to remake contact and email marketing offers a very cost effective way to do this, to make that introduction and try to start that conversation all over again. So when you have all this old data when then…

Some questions to ask yourself?

Where is this business data? – is it in one big list or maybe our receptionist has a list from people who walked in, your sales staff from business cards.

What kind of format is it in? – Do you have any history with this data, i.e. where it was acquired from, who spoke to the contact etc etc

Has it been de duplicated? – important if you are planning on multiple mail shots.

Is it compliant with the data protection act? – this comes back to how the data was acquired, was it acquired by a trawl through records by a keen salesperson or did someone actually contact everyone on your lists?

And if all this seems to much trouble then why not ask our team as we also run our own email marketing system called mailPDQ and we can help you make sense of what you have and how you can use it to your businesses advantage, you can contact us through the website here.

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We are a creative bunch and we value your business like it was our own. By working together with you we can focus all our energies on increasing your visibility online across all the internet be it as specific as Facebook marketing or even SEO we have those skills.